Cantor: GOP Will Defund Health Law

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor says the bill to fund the government for the rest of the year will have language to withhold funding from the health care law by the time it passes the House next week.

It was a message to the party’s conservative base that, no, Republicans haven’t forgotten about defunding the health care law. But Cantor still didn’t promise that the defunding language would be in the bill from the beginning – as tea partiers and other opponents of the law want.

Instead, Cantor referred to the likelihood that Rep. Denny Rehberg of Montana will offer the defunding amendment on the House floor – noting Rehberg’s “insistence” that the bill should not have any money to implement the law.

“I expect to see, one way or the other, the product coming out of the House to speak to that and to preclude any funding to be used for that,” Cantor said.

Rehberg is the chairman of the House Appropriations Labor-HHS subcommittee, and he also just launched a campaign for the Senate, in a bid to unseat Democratic incumbent Jon Tester.

The spending bill, called a continuing resolution, isn’t expected to have the defunding language when it’s released later this week. Instead, Republicans will use the House floor debate next week to force yet another high-profile vote on the health care law – putting both Republicans and Democrats on the record about whether they want the law to survive.

It’s sure to set up a clash with the Democratic-controlled Senate, which won’t approve any spending bill that doesn’t fund the health care law, and with President Barack Obama, who wouldn’t sign that kind of bill into law anyway.

But House Republicans won’t settle for the kind of funding levels Obama and the Senate Democrats would want. And the longer the negotiations on the final spending bill drag out, the greater the risk that the federal government would have to shut down – or limp along from one temporary spending bill to another.

Democrats are already signaling they’ll use a funding showdown to accuse Republicans of re-fighting old health care battles instead of focusing on the economy – a line of attack they’ve been using relentlessly in recent weeks.

“Republicans are ignoring the will of the American people,” said Jon Summers, a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. “Instead of focusing on jobs, they are focused on protecting big insurance companies with policies that would increase the deficit, cost seniors more for prescription drugs, and put insurance companies in charge of your health care.”

Drew Hammill, a spokesman for House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, called it “a two-fer for the GOP: roll back health freedoms and protections for patients in the same bill that that will hurt job creation and stymie economic growth.”

But the most immediate pressure on House Republicans is coming from their own base, which is demanding that they use every chance they get to either repeal the law or cut off the funding for it. Some of them are already suspicious of the Republicans for suggesting the defunding language won’t be in the original bill.

Cantor’s pledge got a lukewarm reaction from outside groups that would prefer that House Republicans just cut off the funding in the original bill.

“This is certainly welcome news. But why wouldn’t they guarantee that Obamacare is defunded by doing so in the original version?” said Alex Cortes, chairman of DefundIt.org. “Leaving it out just sends the wrong signal to the conservative base.”

Mark Meckler, a national tea party coordinator, said simply: “We’ll be watching … closely.”